JP Morgan Sucks at the Government TeatJP Morgan’s credit rating would be much lower without government backing.

As Bloomberg noted last week: JPMorgan benefited from the assumption that there’s a “very high likelihood” the U.S. government would back the bank’s bondholders and creditors if it defaulted on its debt, according to the statement. Without the implied federal backing, JPMorgan’s long-term deposit rating would have been three levels lower and its senior debt would have dropped two more steps, Moody’s said.

And as the editors of Bloomberg pointed out a couple of weeks ago: JPMorgan receives a government subsidy worth about $14 billion a year, according to research published by the International Monetary Fundand our own analysis of bank balance sheets. The money helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses. More important, it distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening to destroy the euro and sink the global economy.

With each new banking crisis, the value of the implicit subsidy grows. In a recent paper, two economists — Kenichi Ueda of the IMF and Beatrice Weder Di Mauro of the University of Mainz — estimated that as of 2009 the expectation of government support was shaving about 0.8 percentage point off large banks’ borrowing costs. That’s up from 0.6 percentage point in 2007, before the financial crisis prompted a global round of bank bailouts.

Neoclassical Economics Is Based on MythNeoclassical economics is a cult which ignores reality in favor of shared myths.

Economics professor Michael Hudson writes: [One Nobel prize winning economist stated,] “In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions.”

This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live….

Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize: “Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them… The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor the conclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made.”

Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences.

European and US Governments Encourage Bank Manipulation and Fraud to Cover Up Insolvencyby Washington's BlogJuly 2, 2012

Governments On Both Sides of the Atlantic Try to Put Lipstick on a PigWe noted yesterday that the big banks have criminally conspired since 2005 to rig $800 trillion dollar Libor-based market.

Barclay’s chairman says that the Bank of England gave explicit approval for the manipulation.

A former Barclay’s executive – who was close to the Libor-setting manipulation – told the Daily Mail that Barclay’s manipulated Libor to make the bank look healthier than it really was, and , and the cover-up led to a slow policy response which prolonged the financial crisis.

This appears to be very similar to what happened in America. As I noted last year: The Tarp Inspector General has said that [then-Secretary of the Treasury Hank] Paulson misrepresented the big banks’ health in the run-up to passage of TARP. This is no small matter, as the American public would have not been very excited about giving money to insolvent institutions.

Europe: An Emergency Program to Resolve the Economic and Social Crisisby Damien Millet and Eric ToussaintJuly 2, 2012

The European governments, in accordance with IMF criteria, have made the choice of imposing strict austerity measures. Slicing away public spending, lay-offs, pay freezes and salary cuts for civil servants, reduced access to vital public services and welfare, later retirement age, etc. Increased cost for public transport, water distribution, health services, education, etc. Heavier indirect and particularly unfair taxes like VAT. Massive privatization of companies in competitive sectors. The strictest austerity policies since 1945. The consequences of the crisis are multiplied by the so-called remedies which protect the interests of capital. Austerity seriously aggravates economic slowdown producing a snowball effect: weak growth, when there is any, automatically increases public debt. The meaning of 'triple A' becomes clear: wage Austerity, monetary Austerity and budgetary Austerity.

People are less and less willing to accept the injustice of these reforms and the serious social regression they incur. Relatively, it is the workers, the unemployed and the lowest income households who are called upon by the States to ensure the continued fattening of the creditors. Amongst these it is, as usual, women who bear the brunt of precarious, part-time and underpaid employment[2] as imposed on them by the present social and patriarchal system. The struggle for a different social logic is inseparable from the struggle for the absolute respect of women's rights.

Kicking The Can Down The Road: Europe Still Headed for the Greatest Financial Crisis Since the Great DepressionMichael Snyder, ContributorMonday, July 2, 2012Activist Post

Has Europe finally been saved this time? Has this latest "breakthrough" solved the European debt crisis?

Of course not.

European leaders have held 18 summits since the beginning of the debt crisis. After most of the preceding summits, global financial markets responded with joy because European leaders had reached "a deal" which would supposedly solve the crisis.

But a few weeks after each summit it would become clear that nothing had been solved and that the financial crisis had actually gotten even worse than before. How many times do they expect us to fall for the same sorry routine?

Nothing in Europe has been solved. You can't solve a debt problem with more debt. European leaders are just kicking the can down the road. More debt will relieve some of the short-term pressure, but in a few weeks it will be apparent that the underlying problems in Europe continue to grow. Unfortunately, there is not an unlimited amount of EU bailout money, so once all of these "financial bullets" have been fired European leaders are going to find that kicking the can down the road will not be so easy anymore. The truth is that the financial crisis in Europe has not been cancelled - it has just been put off for a few weeks or a few months.

There will be no resolution of capitalism's crisis driven character. Even as the last bubble deflates, the next bubble is being blown (with taxpayer funding.) Blaming it on the bankers (who are a symptom of a deeper malaise) will once again lead us down the road to nowhere, as the system is fundamentally destined to swallow itself through the greed it inculcates.

Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

There will be no resolution of capitalism's crisis driven character. Even as the last bubble deflates, the next bubble is being blown (with taxpayer funding.) Blaming it on the bankers (who are a symptom of a deeper malaise) will once again lead us down the road to nowhere, as the system is fundamentally destined to swallow itself through the greed it inculcates.

The two-day European Union summit concluded Thursday with an agreement, reached after 14 hours of acrimonious talks, to provide short-term relief to besieged Spanish and Italian banks by allowing the EU bailout fund to directly aid euro zone banks. Previously, the rules governing the 500 billion-euro European Stability Mechanism (ESM), slated to come on line next month, restricted EU lending to national governments.

With the banking systems of Spain and Italy, the fourth and third largest economies using the common European currency, under increasing pressure from the financial markets and credit rating agencies, and interest rates on the two nations’ government bonds climbing to unsustainable levels, the government heads of Spain, Italy and France, backed by Washington and the International Monetary Fund, were insistent on the need for immediate measures to shore up the banks. There was no time, they argued, for the protracted negotiations and bureaucratic delays involved in official state bailouts, such as those carried out in Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Going into the summit, Germany had reiterated its resistance to any such short-term measures until agreement had first been reached on a new political structure for the euro zone, in which national governments would subordinate their budgetary and taxing powers to an overarching authority in Brussels, tasked with policing euro zone member-states to enforce strict limits on budget deficits and national debts.

In practice, Germany, as the strongest economy and biggest donor to regional bailout funds, would dominate the new “fiscal and political union,” and behind Germany the major international banks would exert their influence more directly than ever.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had also repeated her opposition to calls from French President Francois Hollande and his southern European allies for euro bonds or other measures to spread debt liabilities across the euro zone, and had roundly denounced before the German parliament a proposal submitted to the summit by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy to move toward euro bonds along with a banking union and centralized fiscal authority.

In other words, they are going directly to the core of the problem....bank balance sheets and the massive loss lurking therein in the form of massive holdings of toxic derivatives. It's not spending on social services that is the problem. Of course none of this is mentioned by the MSM as workers continue to be attacked for being greedy or lazy.

Not that I would have expected otherwise from the apologists for this unsustainable system...unsustainable economically and in it's interactions with our planets climate envelope.

Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

As governments throughout the world close schools, lay off workers and slash support to the poor, old and sick, the financial oligarchy that rules the world increases its wealth and power.

The incomes of the top-earning bank CEOs grew 12 percent last year, according to an analysis of the 15 largest global banks conducted by pay research group Equilar. These executives received an average of $12.8 million apiece, even though the stock values, earnings, and profits of most of the banks shrank.

Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, once again topped the list, taking in $23.1 million, an 11 percent increase over 2010. Under Dimon’s watch, JPMorgan recently disclosed billions of dollars in speculative losses.

Governments across the globe have bailed out these banks to the tune of trillions of dollars. They have massively subsidized these giant, privately-owned financial institutions, and they stand ready to rescue them again if and when necessary.

The report on bankers’ pay was released only days after Hawaii’s governor announced that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had bought Lanai, the sixth-largest Hawaiian island, for between $500 and $600 million. The island’s 3,000 residents will be as dependent on Ellison’s good will as were the vassals of the Middle Ages to their lord.

Ellison, the third-richest individual in the United States, is notorious both for his extravagance and his petty avarice. In 2008, he won a $3 million tax refund from the city of Woodside, California after a court ruled that his house, a reproduction of a Japanese emperor’s estate that cost $200 million to build, was worth only $100 million on the current market.

The court declared that nobody besides Ellison could afford to live in the house, which gave it “limited market appeal,” and on that basis lowered the Oracle executive’s property taxes.

They all get dragged into the service of the elite. Happens everytime.

Until they intellectually understand why capitalism is robbing their kids of a future, they will continue to blindly follow their own interests like donkeys (at least donkeys have an excuse for having a minimised sense of sentience).

Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Information has been leaked about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is being negotiated in secret by US Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Six hundred corporate “advisors” are in on the know, but not Congress or the media. Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate trade subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the TPP, has not been permitted to see the text or to know the content.

The TPP has been called a “one-percenter” power tool. The agreement essentially abolishes the accountability of foreign corporations to governments of countries with which they trade. Indeed, the agreement makes governments accountable to corporations for costs imposed by regulations, including health, safety and environmental regulations. The agreement gives corporations the right to make governments pay them for the cost of complying with the regulations of government. One wonders how long environmental, labor, and financial regulation can survive when the costs of compliance are imposed on the taxpayers of countries and not on the economic activity that results in spillover effects such as pollution.

Many will interpret the TPP as another big step toward the establishment of global government in the New World Order. However, what the TPP actually does is to remove corporations or the spillover effects of their activities from the reach of government. As the TPP does not transfer to corporations the power to govern countries, it is difficult to see how it leads to global government. The real result is global privilege of the corporate class as a class immune to government regulation.

One of the provisions allows corporations to avoid the courts and laws of countries by creating a private tribunal that corporations can use to sue governments for the costs of complying with regulation. Essentially, the laws of countries that apply to corporations are supplanted by decisions of a private tribunal of corporate lawyers.

There will be a two tier effect.Core goods such as energy and fuel will experience runaway inflation (demand for the latter will be driven by a race to the bottom by the excess of manufacturers globally or deflation...the second tier.). Profit squeeze is where capitalism's achilles heel lies. Turning China into a cash cow was a bad move by Western capitalists...very stupid....but then stupidity is what will bring this fiasco to an end.

Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Local Governments Which Entered Into Interest Rate Swaps Got ScalpedWe know that the big banks conspired to manipulate Libor rates, with the approval of government authorities.

We know that the Libor manipulation effected the world’s largest market – interest rate derivatives.

But who are the biggest victims?

Sometimes the big banks manipulated the Libor rates up, and sometimes down. Different groups of people got hurt depending which way the rates were gamed.

Bloomberg’s Darrell Preston explained last year how cities and other local governments got scalped when rates were manipulated downward: In the U.S., municipal borrowers used swaps to guard against the risk of higher interest costs on variable-rate debt by exchanging payments with another entity and tying how much they pay to an underlying value such as an index. The agreements can backfire if rates move in unexpected directions, resulting in issuers making larger payments.The derivatives were often designed to offset the risks of increases in the short-term rates tied to auction-rate securities, fixing borrowers’ costs by trading their debt- service payments with another party. Instead, rates dropped.

The yield on two-year Treasury notes fell from about 5.1 percent in June 2007 to a record 0.14 percent on Sept. 20. On Oct. 6, the U.S. Treasury sold $10 billion of five-day cash- management bills at 0 percent.

Three days after European Union leaders agreed at their summit in Brussels to intensify their social attacks on working people across the continent, the Eurostat statistics agency reported that unemployment reached a new record high in May in the 17-nation euro zone.

According to Eurostat, unemployment in the euro zone hit 11.1 percent in May, an increase from April’s rate of 11.0. The April figure was a full percentage point higher than the rate in April 2010. The unemployment rate in the euro zone has risen continually since April 2008, when it stood at 6.8 percent.

The jobless rate is likely to rise further in the coming months. It is widely believed that the euro zone has officially slid into recession this quarter, and the most recent manufacturing data show overall stagnation and an outright decline in Germany, the strongest economy in Europe and the continent’s biggest exporter.

The downward turn in Europe is part of a global trend. The Institute for Supply Management reported Monday that manufacturing activity in the United States declined sharply in June, marking the first monthly contraction since 2009. The Chinese government reported Sunday that the country’s manufacturing activity in June grew at its slowest pace since November.

European youth unemployment, in particular, has risen dramatically. It increased from 20.5 percent in May 2011 to 22.6 percent last month. The highest youth jobless rate—52.1 percent—was recorded by Greece and Spain.

This means that more than half of all young people in these countries are out of work under conditions where many of their parents have been laid off or suffered wage cuts and the education systems are under systematic attack. According to the European Commission, 68 percent of all Greek youngsters say they would like to leave the country.

In Greece and Spain, the overall unemployment rates now stand at the record levels of 21.9 percent and 24.6 percent, respectively. In both countries unemployment has risen sharply in the past year. In May 2011, unemployment stood at 20.9 percent in Spain and 15.7 percent in Greece.

You've got some good stuff here, Roxy. Keep up the good work. Will add this thread to my RSS bar.

Quoting: Marxist

Thanks!

It has some 70-80 views a day, & I suppose those are people who are interested, that's why I keep it going.

It also gives a clear oversight of what has happened in the past 11 months.

I'm a free-lance (research) editor, mostly for talk shows, & it's handy to keep a huge archive on all sorts of subjects, where you know your way around.

And the only reason someone hires me, is that nearly all my 'colleagues' fish in the same (google) river & I fish on the 7 seas, so I come up with something special.

Quoting: RoXY

Your thread has a nice flow to it with your interpretation of whats going on behind the scenes. (Zerohedge has a reasonably good stab at the task but is a free marketeer which kills his understanding of the bigger forces at play (for me anyways)).

Anyways, look forward to more of your take on the economy.

Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

The Western Welfare State: Its Rise and Demise and the Soviet Blocby Prof. James PetrasJuly 4, 2012

IntroductionOne of the most striking socio-economic features of the past two decades is the reversal of the previous half-century of welfare legislation in Europe and North America . Unprecedented cuts in social services, severance pay, public employment, pensions, health programs, educational stipends, vacation time, and job security are matched by increases in tuition, regressive taxation, and the age of retirement as well as increased inequalities, job insecurity and workplace speed-up.

The demise of the ‘welfare state’ demolishes the idea put forth by orthodox economists, who argued that the ‘maturation’ of capitalism, its ‘advanced state’, high technology and sophisticated services, would be accompanied by greater welfare and higher income/standard of living. While it is true that ‘services and technology’ have multiplied, the economic sector has become even more polarized, between low paid retail clerks and super rich stock brokers and financiers. The computerization of the economy has led to electronic bookkeeping, cost controls and the rapid movements of speculative funds in search of maximum profit while at the same time ushering in brutal budgetary reductions for social programs.

The ‘Great Reversal’ appears to be a long-term, large-scale process centered in the dominant capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America and in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe . It behooves us to examine the systemic causes that transcend the particular idiosyncrasies of each nation.

Fears that food prices will rocket at the end of the year after a poor U.S. harvest were heightened after predictions that a drought across the Midwest will to continue for at least another week.

Maize yields are suffering after a long drought that hurt the crop in its crucial pollination phase, experts said, as the price of Chicago new-crop corn jumped more than 3% to its highest since last autumn.

Soybean crops and the crucial wheat harvest are also expected to suffer in the blistering heat, which has stayed in the high 30s centigrade for much of the last few months.

The U.S. government played down the extent of the problem with figures showing farmers planted more fields of maize and soybeans, which it said should offset the fall in crop yields.

The Western Welfare State: Its Rise and Demise and the Soviet Blocby Prof. James PetrasJuly 4, 2012

IntroductionOne of the most striking socio-economic features of the past two decades is the reversal of the previous half-century of welfare legislation in Europe and North America . Unprecedented cuts in social services, severance pay, public employment, pensions, health programs, educational stipends, vacation time, and job security are matched by increases in tuition, regressive taxation, and the age of retirement as well as increased inequalities, job insecurity and workplace speed-up.

The demise of the ‘welfare state’ demolishes the idea put forth by orthodox economists, who argued that the ‘maturation’ of capitalism, its ‘advanced state’, high technology and sophisticated services, would be accompanied by greater welfare and higher income/standard of living. While it is true that ‘services and technology’ have multiplied, the economic sector has become even more polarized, between low paid retail clerks and super rich stock brokers and financiers. The computerization of the economy has led to electronic bookkeeping, cost controls and the rapid movements of speculative funds in search of maximum profit while at the same time ushering in brutal budgetary reductions for social programs.

The ‘Great Reversal’ appears to be a long-term, large-scale process centered in the dominant capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America and in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe . It behooves us to examine the systemic causes that transcend the particular idiosyncrasies of each nation.

Capitalism's natural tendency is towards accumulation and the consolidation of labour surplus value in the hands of fewer and fewer so I am not surprised. This exercise is dependent to a large extent on the rise of a false consciousness (fascism, free marketeerism masquerading as libertarianism and of course, that old favourite of the elites, religion.) Until we recognise that the system compels conformity to its inner logic (material dialecticism in action or the praxis of the market), this process will continue to its logical end despite attempts to render the momentum of capital, ethical.

Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!

The above link illustrates my point above and of course the futility of socialism in one country.

Quoting: Marxist

Meet China's new leader: Pon Zi...

So on the one hand, we have companies guaranteeing each other's debt (loans), and on the other hand, we have companies buying excessive numbers of equipment, which they pay for with loans provided by the suppliers on condition excessive numbers are bought.

That equipment is then used as collateral to secure more loans. Large parts of these loans are then used to speculate in real estate markets. In both instances, and don't let's forget the overlapping ones where both schemes are combined, we are talking about absolutely virtual money. Are these incidents perhaps? I find that hard to believe in view of how Chinese society is organized: major profits will attract major attention, a pyramid of perfect dimensions.

Charles Ponzi, eat your heart out. You may have been a fine crook, but you never even dreamed of operating on this scale. When these guys are done, they’ll leave nothing but a shell of a country behind. The Chinese elite has amassed far more in wealth than all the country's vaunted foreign reserves put together. That is something people all over the world need to very seriously think about.

The Socialization Of America Is Economically ImpossibleBrandon Smith, ContributorThursday, July 5, 2012Activist Post

I understand the dream of the common socialist. I was, after all, once a Democrat. I understand the disparity created in our society by corporatism (not capitalism, though some foolish socialists see them as exactly the same). I understand the drive and the desire to help other human beings, especially those in dire need, and the tendency to see government as the ultimate solution to all our problems.

That said, let’s be honest; government is in the end just a tool used by one group or another to implement a particular methodology or set of principles. Unfortunately, what most socialists today don’t seem to understand is that no matter what strategies they devise, they will NEVER have control. And, those they wish to help will be led to suffer, because the establishment does not care about them, or you. The establishment does not think of what it can give, it thinks about what it can take. Socialism, in the minds of the elites, is a con-game which allows them to quarry the favor of the serfs, and nothing more.